Cydia

Nick Hesson wrote this morning about an Engadget post that purported to show pictures of a fourth-generation iPhone found on the floor of a bar in San Jose, near Apple headquarters. Nick wasn't buying it, and sure enough, a user on the Spanish site Applesfera wrote in to say that he'd bought an identical phone - likely a Chinese shanzhai knockoff - in Japan last year. So that's it, right? Just another fake photo in the long series of fake iPhone G4 (the term TiPB is using - as opposed to 4G) photos we've been seeing for about a year.

Well, the guys at Engadget are sticking to their guns. They went back and looked at an image that had supposedly been tweeted from Apple labs back in January. The photo showed an iPhone laying on top of the iPad, which was bolted to the table in what may have been some sort of an RF testing harness. Alongside the iPad was another iPhone, and when you look at the picture, it bears a distinct resemblance to the supposed barroom-floor iPhone that Engadget had been showing off earlier.

In addition, other photos emerged from WeiPhone, the Chinese site that earlier leaked pictures of the iPad case, as well as the internal "K84" designator that Apple employees used while the name "iPad" was still secret. The new photos, which appear on the forums at MacRumors, show internal components, as well as the screen, the bezel, and the back case, which definitely looks like the case of the "lost and found" phone.

So what's the deal here? I agree with Nick that this phone's blocky design seems really "off" for Apple. To me it looks more like a big version of the Sony Ericsson C510 I had back in 2004. On the other hand, maybe he's right that this could be a prototype version Apple's using for testing, and that the released phone will actually look like an iPhone. It still seems really sketchy, though.